When Palmer Luckey was hacking together virtual reality headsets at his startup Oculus VR in the mid-2010s, he would sometimes imagine a future in which US soldiers used the technology to sharpen their battlefield senses. That vision is now virtually a reality after a deal that will bring software from …
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Life aboard a US Navy warship at sea can be stressful, boring, and lonely, with separation from friends and family and long stretches between port calls both isolating and monotonous. Now, Elon Musk is here to take the edge off. In a now deleted press release from the Naval Information …
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The United States Defense Department has ideas about a dramatic strategy for defending Taiwan against a Chinese military offensive that would involve deploying an “unmanned hellscape" consisting of thousands of drones buzzing around the island nation. Meanwhile, the US National Institute of Standards and Technology announced a red-team hacking competition …
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Gabrielle Rifkind operates in the shadows, in the quiet, dark, back rooms of international politics. A bit paradoxically, the 71-ish Londoner strikes a sharp pose: outré pantsuits, dresses. Cool, kooky glasses. A white shock of bobbed hair. Upon meeting her, you really want to talk to her. Which is perhaps …
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Roman Pohorilyi was 22 when he started tracking Russian troop movements near Ukraine’s border. It was the fall of 2021, and he and a childhood friend, Ruslan Mykula, had been sharing news about foreign affairs to an audience of about 200 subscribers on a Telegram channel. It was just a …
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It has become conventional wisdom among the halls of the United States government that China will launch a full-scale invasion of Taiwan within the next few years. And when that happens, the US military has a relatively straightforward response in mind: Unleash hell. Speaking to The Washington Post on the …
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If you’re one of the millions of Americans who live within range of its 450 intercontinental ballistic missile silos, the Pentagon has written you off as an acceptable casualty. The silos are scattered across North Dakota, Montana, Colorado, Wyoming, and Nebraska in a zone of sacrifice—what lawmakers and military planners …
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On April 16, police entered Google offices in New York and California to detain several employees protesting a $1.2 billion cloud contract with Israel’s government called Project Nimbus. The deal, shared with Amazon, has met pushback from some employees at both companies since 2021, but the protests have grown louder …
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The day is slowly turning into night, and the American special operators are growing concerned. They are deployed to a densely populated urban center in a politically volatile region, and local activity has grown increasingly frenetic in recent days, the roads and markets overflowing with more than the normal bustle …
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Drones have changed war. Small, cheap, and deadly robots buzz in the skies high above the world’s battlefields, taking pictures and dropping explosives. They’re hard to counter. ZeroMark, a defense startup based in the United States, thinks it has a solution. It wants to turn the rifles of frontline soldiers …
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